How to replace the Longshot trigger plate?

A while ago I lost the trigger plate (the bit that stops holds the plunger in place and moves up when you pull the trigger) on my Longshot, and instead of taking the easy route of buying a replacement I decided to make my own out of two stacked 3mm plates of clear PVC/acrylic:

As you can see it so by no means perfect, and after swapping in a 10kg OMW spring, it will no longer catch.Sometimes I can feel it slide into place but it won't actually lock, and sometimes I can bring the bolt halfway back to forward position before it suddenly releases. Either way, it is impossible to prime/fire anymore.

It is 30mm wide, with a 20mm wide inner cutout/semicircle. Should be 6mm thick but I probably sanded it.

My question is, is there a noticeable flaw in the design of my trigger plate that causes it to not work, or is it just the slight inaccuracies of hand drilling/sanding? Perhaps if somebody could post some measurements of the original then that could help.

Hey man, nice job on the replacement. Without even talking about the dimensions, here are a few things you could try:

Try with the stock spring again, could rule out whether the 10kg force is the issueTry a longer catch spring, the issue could be that its too short and not pushing the catch down far enoughRemove all the priming locks and all that other crap if you haven't already

I measured the springs I was using and discovered that my replacement was 12mm instead of the stock 13mm. I don't think it matters because as you can see in the photo below the plate is being pushed down far enough (at least when the blaster is not screwed together)

I tried adding another catch spring, to try and balance out the force, and bingo it caught once! However subsequent times it went back to old ways, which leads me to believe that after the blaster is primed once or twice, the catch fails to return to its original position.

I think the difficulty with diagnosing this issue stems from not being able to see inside the blaster when I'm priming it. If only I had a little camera or a transparent shell.

Here's what it looks like when it is primed with the stock spring:

Do you have a recommended place to get trigger catch springs? like from a pen or something?

I haven't had a chance to get down to Bunnings but I did have another fiddle with my Longshot.

I remembered about the the small cutout on the top of the plate:

Originally this was to ensure the spring stayed in place. I have since put a screw through the top of the plastic shell which removed the need for the cutout. So I filled up that cutout with hot glue.

Turns out that although my replacement catch spring was virtually identical to the stock one, because of that cutout its effective length was much less. With the cutout filled in, my Longshot now primes properly about 95% of the time